Because I am bad at drawing map, I use the map of north america

Research Hopewell culture and plan accordingly. Alternatively, Iriquois masterrace

The four corners area looks good for a naturally defensible position.

New Orleans would be the capital since it could control all trade on the river going out to sea. Chicago would be a good northern poltical center.

Also do you thinks it's possible for some state to exist around Florida and the areas that make up the real life states next to it

California

How would they expand beyond their borders?

They don't really need to.

that map is fucked

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>Nobody mentions canada.

Is canada so bad?

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any map featuring the northern American border already shows 90% of Canada's population

Not very good for an empire, because its growing season is too short.

Historically, many early (bronze-age) empires were based upon *control* of water sources. So, the Mississippi/Great Lakes would not necessarily be as likely as California, the Desert SouthWest, or the high plains along the Texas-Dakota axis to form the first major kingdoms.

The Mississippi River and the Great Lakes would have been powerful trade routes sure, but possibly more likely to have city-states and federations thereof than autocratic empires.

Though, just because the *first* empires arose in the desert, that doesn't mean that there won't be an empire based in the fertile heartland during the time period you're basing your setting upon.

The Midwest, specifically the Ohio River Valley, and the Mississippi River. Lots of waterways for trade, some of the most fertile soil in the world, fairly mild climate, lots of flat land for easy construction of roads and whatnot. Eastern border protected by the Appalachian mountains, western border by the Rockies. Northern border protected by hundreds of miles of barren nothingness.

It's a topographical map, retard.

It's effing cold. There's good reason it's population is 1/10th that of the US.

OP, I ran a campaign that lasted years while using a map of some tiny islands here in Britbong. Try using a map more original, it would be pretty boring for your players to just shove fiction onto a layout I assume they're familiar with.

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>Thinly veiled fantasy America thread.
You could of just asked user, we like these as much as you do.

Same way China does. Just send some spare armies to go fuck around in shitty mountains and deserts. You don't need to do too much conquering when you already have everything.

I call dibs on Apalachia for the Dwarves!

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the middle east, south america, and east asia

hows this map?

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Weren't there a bunch of actual empires in Mexico?

Also, the Comanche were pretty much yet another incarnation of the Kurgan/Huns/Mongols who managed at least one empire.

>Whitehall
>Northwall
>Stromness
>Scar

Even the place names sound like they're from a not-bothering-to-try fantasy setting.

You'd be surprised how much mileage you can get out of simply flipping and mirroring a map, especially if you only show part of a familiar landmass. It was seriously weeks before my players realized what they were looking at.

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So fantasy america would look like China?

It doesn't model real-world geography very well but that doesn't matter very much.

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I spotted Michigan in about 2 seconds because I live there. I'd have cropped it out a bit more via zoom myself; it's kind of recognizable.

It's stupid and has a lot of mistakes and nonsense.

The Great Lakes gives it away, I'd have photoshopped them a bit.

Everything east of the rocky mountains.

The Ozarks of course.

I mentioned the St. Lawrence.

care to expand on that?

There would probably be three main political states/empires in a fantasy setting of the US, based around the natural barriers of the Appalachian and Rockies.

The first one would basically be a large area of loggers, fishermen, and trade routes running along the coastline and around the top of Florida to trade with the other empires.

The second empire will easily be the largest, stretching from the Ohio River Valley all the way to the Rockies. They trade mostly in farm goods, salted meats, and a lot of textiles. With so much fertile land and a pretty long growing season, they would make a shit ton of food and just sell it to the other two empires.

The last empire is basically just Oregon and California, but that's still a lot of land, and they trade in mineral goods, ores, stone, and gems. Probably the richest in terms of potential raw currency, but not as much land for farming combined with Rocky terrain in the northern half of the empire means they also engage in some seafaring trade, probably not as much as the East Coast empire.

There's probably a handful of passageways and routes dug into/on/around the mountains to allow for land trade to occur, but ships carry the bulk of the goods around.

What to do with Mexico?

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What the fuck is Le--n.

here's what I whipped up.

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The northern part is essentially useless desert.

A lot of wealth is concentrated in the south, and there’s power to be had in the Gulf.

Empires need natural defenses and preferably ocean access. France was great because it's mostly surrounded by sea, mountains and the Rhine. Britain was great because it is a huge island protect by water on all sides.

Grasslands do not protect you from people come beat you and take all your stuff.

Which is why the people there expand to conquer their enemies before enemies can conquer them. See the Mongols and the Russians. Also the Comanche.

>I use the map of north america
>except I don't

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I think St. Louis would make a better capital, thanks to a more central location, the nearby confluence of Missouri and Mississippi rivers, less extreme climate than either Chicago or New Orleans, and based on the proximity to the historical Missouri/Illinois mound-builder civilization. Chicago's location would be less desirable prior to the construction of the Erie Canal and Industrial Revolution in general.

A friend of mine did something like this before. He had us play as agents of a good king, the kingdom comprised of most of Venture, and San Luis Obispo counties, in California.

He got the idea from looking at a topographical map and wondered like you did what the are would look like if you stripped away the modern cities and made it western fantasy.

Basically the entire west coast was small kingdoms and city states, and the Central Valley was a once a great empire that is now ruins and hordes of undead. Sadly we never got to play in that world.

León, the -- is because whatever shit rendered that was unable to render the accents. Like Ciudad Obregón, Mérida, Cancún, Ciudad Juárez, San Luis Potosí, etc.

This DESU

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I think the great plains would be home of horse nomads

I think the "problem" with America is that it doesn't really have any clearly defined natural boundaries that actually allow for the defendable borders of many empires. The border with Canada was basically an arbitrary straight line West of the Great Rivers based on treates, and for the rest America easily managed to Manifest its Destiny. The closest thing you get are the mountains/desert in the West, the Mississippi river and the Appalachians in the East. It's not the same as Europe or parts of Asia in that loads of natural boundaries allow for relatively small and diverse states to rise.

In that sense it's a "bad" setting, but it also explains why America is sometimes called "the inevitable empire". America just hit the jackpot geopolitically.

Actually I was thinking that if you could somehow post OPs map to one of the map threads without anyone knowing what it was you would get a ton of 'that is stupid, real world geography does not work like that' responses.

Looks good, user

There is nothing with few empires

Only if there's horses, which didn't happen until their introduction by the Spanish.

I think the "problem" with Asia is that it doesn't really have any clearly defined natural boundaries that actually allow for the defendable borders of many empires. The border with Europe was basically an arbitrary straight line south of the Caucasus based on religion, and for the rest Mongols easily managed to Manifest their Destiny. The closest thing you get literally one range of mountains running from Anatolia through Persia and the Himalayan plateau into the Chinese highlands. It's not the same as Europe or parts of America in that loads of natural boundaries allow for relatively small and diverse states to rise.

In that sense it's a "bad" setting, but it also explains why Russia is sometimes called "the inevitable empire". Russia just hit the jackpot geopolitically.

Millions of poor people in need of land, railroads, and a culture that supports carving your own patch of land out of the wilderness (or whoever else happens to be there first) can get a lot done. The USA has plenty of good borders, they just can't stop what got thrown at them.
The question is, what kind of tech/magic do we have access to?

Newfoundland and the St. Lawrence estuary give it away right off the bat.

For me it was the Hudson bay. It's huge, central, and distinctive.

Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Illinois have very well-defined borders. You could unite the five of them with almost no changes at all and you'd have a fairly powerful country with nice, 'natural' borders. You could put a bunch of small little polities in the Appalachian Plateau, separating the Lacustrine Empire from the East Coast states. Probably north of the Hudson could be unitied into a Lawrencian Empire, with the lower Hudson and Mohawk rivers forming its southern and western boundary, and the St. Lawrence its north. Depending on how much the economy, culture, and development level of your world matches the real world the rest of the East Coast could be tricky but probably the Potomac on down to Florida bounded by the Appalachian Ridge and the Chattahoochee or Mobile river in the West. For a medieval setting that region would probably not be easily united, since it's lots of hills except for the coast and that's a pretty damn big stretch of territory - expect lots of wars here. The Ozarks provide another good boundary, and you could conceivably see a decent sized country west of the Appalachians spanning from Tennessee at its northern boundary to the Ozarks and south along both sides of the Mississippi. The Great Plains are the biggest challenge for sensible division, but the Rio Grande is still a decent southern border. The Mississippian Empire could conceivably control more of the gulf in what's now Texas, or a state centered around where Austin is now could control it and be in competition with the Mississippians for the built up and fertile regions around the Gulf. Further inland you'd probably have pastoralists on much of the great plains, who may be ruled by nations centered around trading cities along the Platte, Missouri, Arkansas, or Red rivers, but their borders would be very fluid outside of those centers, except possibly a Missouri-centered state which would probably have a solid border with the Lacustrines.

What place if you want a lot of city-states?

The Great Basin and what's now New Mexico and Arizona is mostly desert and mountains and would probably be the least inhabited of the whole place. These could be claimed but not really bothered with besides some mining operations by the more livable areas around them or they could just be full of nomads. The Northern Rockies though are very rich in metal resources and there are fertile valleys all throughout, so an organized state there is a possibility. The West Coast would probably look much like the East Coast, with wealthy and prosperous states centered around the coast and focused more on pushing north or south (if they're expansionistic, which they won't necessarily be) than through the Rockies and the deserts and lots of cultural contact between each other. There'd probably be cities in about the same spots there are now. Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco are all built up around the best natural harbors on that coastline. That region would stretch north up through Alaska, though how far is in the air, and Californians would probably end up controlling Baja, though I doubt there'd be much going on down there.

City-states are more of a social than geographical phenomenon. You could put them pretty much anywhere, but if there are big states all around them there should be some reason they haven't united or been conquered.

NA coastline, DC up to Boston.

This is a thread about re-using real world maps as fantasy maps, not a thread about fantasy set in pre-columbus america

Well, yeah - I told you right off the bat that there was something to look for, and presented you with a blank map.

California is probably the best place in the west for an empire, although unless they tried to stretch it east, they wouldn't get very far. The PNW would likely be very difficult to conquer, as it's all mountains, valleys, thick forests, and more mountains. We can't even build Seattle that big compared to a lot of other major cities around the US because we have water on one side and mountains on the other.

Any Californian empire would get to the southern reaches of Oregon and then there'd be trouble. The southern reaches of Washington might also fall, but by the time you hit Everett or Arlington, you'd be stuck pretty clearly in the Californian version of Rome's own little Vietnam in Germania.

In the PNW smaller independent kingdoms or city-state republics would be the name of the game. And if we're assuming technology ranging from the classical hellenic to the twelfth or fourteenth century (a fair enough range for a lot of fantasy), then you'd have to deal with America's own equivalent to the Ithilien Rangers. Hunting culture up here is absolutely insane, and for being a part of the liberal west, even a lot of our progressive areas have a massive collection of personal firearms. I'm sure it would go the same way with hunting bows, javelins, and especially spears and axes once we realized a medieval California was looking at us funny.

Something like this could work for the eastern US, with four main 'empires' separated by minor states, mountain fiefdoms, empty prairie, and of course lands that just get fought over and change ownership frequently.

I have to admit that I don't know the West Coast as well, but you could easily get two big rival nations there, I'll try to throw something together in a few more minutes.

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I'm assuming that like before, unpainted land is contested? Because neither the green nor pink empire in question would let the Palouse go if they could help it. The farmland is just far too good.

Oh yeah, and same with the central valley in California, which I've rather erroneously given to Red & Green instead of leaving it conflicted..

What is the tecnological (well, probably agro-pastoral) package?

Except Russia is empty tundra, the Mongols fluked out quite quickly, there are more than enough natural borders throughout the inhabitable parts of the continent and the only non-tundra part of Asia really devoid of clearly defining natural borders is debatably China, explaining whi it somewhat consistently remaind so big (except when in civil war, which was admittedly half of its history).